Show and tell: Student and instructor perceptions of screencast assessment

This study addresses students’ and instructors’ perceptions of screencast assessment and compares this feedback method to traditional paper or digital text-based comments. Screencast assessment allows for asynchronous audio and visual commenting on student papers using screencast software. A pilot study using surveys of 39 students enrolled in lower-level composition classes and surveys of five composition instructors have indicated that screencast assessment promotes detailed and effective feedback on student writing. This feedback method reveals instructor's thought process while grading, and this transparency fosters student–teacher communication about writing. Screencast assessment changes the detail and types of comments, fostering an increased use of macro-level comments over micro-level concerns. The method does not necessarily save time grading but allows for feedback in the same amount of time. Because of the suggestion that students and instructors value screencast assessment, this study warrants a larger scale project in order to investigate the student preference for this feedback and whether the method leads to improvement in student performance.     

Comparison of online and classroom-based student evaluations of instruction

In recent years, colleges have been moving from traditional, classroom‐based student evaluations of instruction to online evaluations. Because of the importance of these evaluations in decisions regarding retention, promotion and tenure, instructors are justifiably concerned about how this trend might affect their ratings. We recruited faculty members who were teaching two or more sections of the same course in a single semester and assigned at least one section to receive online evaluations and the other section(s) to receive classroom evaluations. We hypothesised that the online evaluations would yield a lower response rate than the classroom administration. We also predicted that there would be no significant differences in the overall ratings, the number of written comments, and the valence (positive/neutral/negative) of students’ comments. A total of 32 instructors participated in the study over two semesters, providing evaluation data from 2057 students. As expected, online evaluations had a significantly lower response rate than classroom evaluations. Additionally, there were no differences in the mean ratings, the percentage of students who provided written comments or the proportion of comments in the three valence categories. Thus, even with the lower response rate for online evaluations, the two administration formats seemed to produce comparable data.     

Characteristics of effective exams—Development and validation of an instrument for evaluating written exams

Students’ feedback is common in teaching evaluation, but there is no documented instrument enabling instructors to systematically gather relevant student feedback on written exams in higher education. Three studies are described to develop a valid instrument for evaluating written exams. Study 1 analyzes characteristics of effective written exams from the perspective of students and instructors, using qualitative content-analysis. This informs study 2, which analyzes and revises the structure of a questionnaire via exploratory factor analysis. In study 3, confirmatory factor analysis and cross-validation are conducted to confirm the structure found in study 2. Central factors are “Transparency”, “Composition of the exam” and “Students’ workload”. Students’ feedback as assessed by this questionnaire provides reliable feedback to improve the quality of exams.     

A longitudinal,quantitative study of student attitudes towards audio feedback for assessment

This paper reports on the findings of a three-year longitudinal study investigating the experiences of postgraduate level students who were provided with audio feedback for their assessment. Results indicated that students positively received audio feedback. Overall, students indicated a preference for audio feedback over written feedback. No statistically significant differences were found between male and female students’ attitudes, suggesting that both sexes held similar attitudes towards audio feedback. Students also indicated a preference for audio feedback that was recorded simply and returned promptly over delayed, more sophisticatedly recorded and edited feedback.     

Using Opinion Mining as an educational analytic: An integrated strategy for the analysis of students’ feedback

The analysis of students’ feedback written in natural language has been poorly considered in academic institutions, looking more frequently at students’ ratings as a base to evaluate courses and instructors. Statistical text analyses offer the possibility of exploring text collections from a quantitative viewpoint. Particularly interesting is Opinion Mining (OM), a family of techniques at the crossroads of Statistics, Linguistics and Computer Science. OM allows evaluating the sentiment of individual opinions, highlighting their semantic orientation. In an educational context, this approach allows processing students’ comments and creating powerful analytics. This paper aims at introducing readers to OM, presenting a strategy to compute the sentiment polarity of students’ comments. After explaining the rationale of the proposal and its mathematical formalisation, a toy example is presented to show how it works in practice. A discussion about theoretical and empirical implications offers some hints about its potentiality in a learning environment.     

Written feedback provided by first-year engineering students,undergraduate teaching assistants,and educators on design project work

ABSTRACT

Feedback is an important part of design education. To better understand how feedback is provided to students on their engineering design work, we characterised and compared first-year engineering students’, undergraduate teaching assistants’, and educators’ written feedback on sample student design work. We created a coding scheme including two domains: Substance and Focus of feedback. Educators made more and longer comments than undergraduate teaching assistants, and undergraduate teaching assistants made more and longer comments than first-year students. The first-year students focused on giving specific directions in their feedback while educators and undergraduate teaching assistants asked thought-provoking questions. Students tended to make more comments about the ways that their peers had communicated their design work while educators and undergraduate teaching assistants made more comments about the design ideas presented in the sample work. This study offers implications for practice for supporting educators, undergraduate teaching assistants, and first-year engineering students to be able to provide feedback on design work.     

A case study on written comments as a form of feedback in teacher education: so much to gain

In Higher Education, much of a lecturer’s time is spent on supplying students with written comments as a form of feedback on assignments. Although it is clear that students use these comments to make adjustments to their assignments, it is doubtful that these comments create a learning effect. This may indicate that the way feedback is supplied and/or the quality of the feedback lacks information for improving future performance. In this case study, written feedback has been analysed and the perception of students on the quality of written feedback in relation to their learning behaviour has been taken into account.     

Hearing you loud and clear: student perspectives of audio feedback in higher education

The use of audio feedback for students in a full-time community nursing degree course is appraised. The aim of this mixed methods study was to examine student views on audio feedback for written assignments. Questionnaires and a focus group were used to capture student opinion of this pilot project. The majority of students valued audio feedback as more detailed, personalised and supportive than written feedback. Lecturers were also consulted about their experience of audio feedback and its place within current assessment strategies. Further development of this innovative assessment feedback strategy and its integration into a post-registration nursing course is considered.     

Acts of responding. Teachers’ written comments and students’ text revisions

ABSTRACT

This article addresses written feedback to students’ drafts and provides insight into teachers’ formative assessment practices. Data are taken from a large cross-disciplinary project on writing and assessment in Norway and comprises a sample of 7th graders’ writing processes from 11 schools. Teachers’ comments are categorised according to different acts of responding, drawing on theories of language acts. The study also focuses what teachers comment on, and selected examples from students’ revisions illustrate how teachers’ comments are handled. Findings show that a majority of the teacher comments are directive acts, pointing to specific textual aspects – and quite seldom in a dialogic way. The directives constitute a continuum illustrating different degrees of teacher control. Constatives are frequent, but do not necessarily contain facilitating explanations. The timing of the response stands out as a critical factor. The discussion underlines a need for writing instruction that invites students to revisions and involves teachers and students in active dialogues on text.     

Audiotape feedback for essays in distance education

Students who were required to write three short essays for a university level course on photochemistry at the Open university of the Netherlands received either audio-cassette or written feedback on their essays. The students receiving the audio feedback described their experience as personal, enjoyable, complete and clear. Those receiving written feedback described their experience as adequate. The amount of time spent by instructors supplying the feedback differed minimally (X_audio=53 minutes per student; X_written=49 minutes) with the major difference lying in the amount of time spent in preparation. This difference, possibly attributable to novelty with audio as a mode for feedback, was not significant. The amount communicated to the students with audio feedback (per instructor) was significantly greater than the amount communicated with written feedback. There was no difference in the final grades for the two groups of students.Paul A. Kirschner received his Masters in Educational Psychology from the State University of Amsterdam. He has worked as educational technologist at the Open university of the Netherlands since 1983, primarily with the faculties of Natural Sciences and Engineering. Henk van den Brink received his Masters in Educational Psychology from the State University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He has worked at the Open university of the Netherlands since 1984 as an educational technologist, primarily with the Faculty of Economics. Marthie Meester received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the State University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She has worked since 1983 at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Open university of the Netherlands as course team chair for a number of undergraduate and graduate level chemistry courses.     

Using formative assessment to promote argumentation in a university bilingual science course

Formative assessment, bilingualism, and argumentation when combined can enrich bilingual scientific literacy. However, argumentation receives little attention in the practice of bilingual science education. This article describes the effect of a formative assessment-based pedagogical strategy in promoting university students’ argumentation. It examines the written and oral arguments produced by 54 undergraduates (28 females and 26 males, 16–21 years old) in Colombia during a university bilingual (Spanish-English) science course. The data used in this analysis was derived from students’ written responses, and audio and video recordings. The first goal of this study was to determine how this teaching strategy could help students increase the use of English as a means of communication in argumentation in science. The second goal was to establish the potential of the strategy to engage students in argumentative classroom interactions as an essential part of formative assessment. The findings show that the strategy provided participants with opportunities to write their argumentation in Spanish, in English and in a hybrid version using code-switching. Educational implications for higher education are discussed.     

“Commenting on your work is a waste of time only!”: An appraisal-based study of evaluative language in supervisory feedback

Research on supervisory feedback on master’s theses, especially attitudinal stances conveyed in such feedback, is thin on the ground. Students’ construal of their supervisors’ attitudes, however, can have a profound impact on their engagement with supervisory feedback. Drawing on the appraisal framework, which characterizes attitudinal meanings in terms of affect (i.e., emotional responses), judgement (i.e., normative evaluation of human behaviors) and appreciation (i.e., aesthetically-/socially-based evaluation of objects and products), this study examined Nepalese supervisors’ attitudinal stances communicated in written comments on master’s thesis drafts (n = 76) submitted by English-as-a-foreign-language students and oral feedback on proposal and thesis defences (n = 89). Quantitative analyses revealed that while instances of appreciation dominated in the supervisors’ use of evaluative language, judgements were also frequent, with affective responses trailing far behind. In both the oral feedback and written comments, significant disciplinary variations were observed for certain types of judgment and appreciation. These findings are discussed in terms of disciplinary culture and the potential impact of the attitudinal stances on students’ learning. Implications are derived for the productive framing of supervisory feedback to facilitate students’ feedback uptake.     

Traffic Light Cards: a Cross and Modification Between the Minute Paper and Muddiest Point

Muddiest point and minute paper have been popular techniques to obtain feedback from students. However, focusing on the muddiest point too often can be discouraging for both students and instructors; in minute paper, students may often have off-topic comments. Here a cross and modified technique, the ‘traffic light’ card is introduced, to overcome the drawbacks in muddiest point and minute paper. About 2?minutes before the end of lecture, students “traffic light” the given topics on a notecard, in which their understanding is high (green), partial (yellow), or low (red). The results are used by the instructors to give appropriate review in the next lecture and help students gain better understanding in the content.     

Perceptions of tutoring roles and psychological distance among instructors,tutors and students at a Korean university

This study explores issues related to the tutor’s role when initiating tutoring as an institutional strategy at a conventional university. Based on a pilot tutoring program implemented in four college courses, we investigated the perceptions of instructors, tutors and students regarding the role of tutoring and whether it affected the psychological distance between the different types of participants. The results indicated that instructors’ perceptions of the tutor’s primary role and the psychological distance from the students and the tutors differed from the perceptions of the tutors and the students, perhaps because the instructors perceived tutors as a source of instructor support rather than student support. Implications and suggestions are discussed.     

Teaching and learning cultures in higher education: a mismatch in conceptions

ABSTRACT

Instructional approaches in higher education that foster learning based on internal values are required with the enrollment of wider and more diverse audiences. The current study explores this challenge with a focus on the relationship between students’ learning cultures and the way instructors’ view them. We interviewed 76 students and six instructors at an established academic institution. Data comprised of 210 students’ and 146 instructors’ utterances that were analyzed using mixed methods. Findings revealed a mismatch of instructors’ conceptions about the learning culture of the typical student, potentially leading to compromises in their teaching practices. We provide evidence that reciprocal relations exist between cultures of teaching and learning, contributing to the wicked challenges of rethinking the role of teachers in reinforcing passive learning cultures in undergraduate education. Adoption of internal-based values teaching approaches can help break this feedback loop.     

An Insight into Professional Identity Formation: Qualitative Analyses of Two Reflection Interventions During the Dissection Course

The professional behavior of future doctors is increasingly important in medical education. One of the first subjects in the curriculum to address this issue is gross anatomy. The Tuebingen Medical Faculty implemented a learning portfolio and a seminar on medical professionalism during the dissection course. The aims of this research project are to get an overview of how students form a professional identity in the dissection course and to compare the content of both their oral and written reflections on the course. A qualitative analysis was conducted of the oral and written reflections on the dissection laboratory experience. This study was conducted during winter term 2013/2014 with a cohort of 163 participants in the regular dissection course. Written reflection texts (from n = 96 students) and audio recordings from four oral reflection seminar discussions (with n = 11 students) were transcribed and deductively categorized with Mayring’s qualitative content analysis method. Both qualitative analyses show that students reflected on many topics relevant to professional development, including empathy, respect, altruism, compassion, teamwork, and self-regulation. Quantitative analysis reveals that students who attended the oral reflection wrote significantly more in their written reflection than students who did not. There is, however, no difference in the reflection categories. Reflection content from students corresponds with categories derived from existing competency frameworks. Both the seminar (oral reflections) and the learning portfolio (written reflections) present excellent opportunities to foster professional development during anatomy education; the key is using them in conjunction with the dissection course.     

Computer science students’ use of the internet for academic purposes: difficulties and learning processes

ABSTRACT

Higher-education students now have more alternatives for searching for information than previous generations had. The Internet is a vast ocean of information sources, albeit with diverse reliability and quality. In Web 2.0 platforms, any participant can be a content creator. This reality is challenging for both the instructors and the students. We conducted interviews with 12 Computer Science students and 8 instructors from two universities to (a) identify the difficulties students encounter, if at all, (b) identify the learning processes that students undergo, if at all, when using the Internet for their CS studies, in particular, programming tasks; and (c) elicit instructors’ perceptions of students’ use of the Internet. Both students and instructors agreed that although using the Internet is not trivial, direct teaching of this skill is unnecessary. Instructors differed in their attitudes towards students’ use of the internet. We found that in the first year the students’ use of the Internet and their difficulties are similar to reports in the empirical literature, and echo the instructors’ concerns. However, after extensive experience, students undergo a learning process, and their ability to navigate the myriad sources, as well as to search, manage, and effectively evaluate Internet sources improves. Students mentioned their improved abilities to code as a means to effectively evaluate information sources.     

Pre-service Mathematics Teachers’ Noticing Skills and Scaffolding Practices

A 14-week course program was designed to investigate pre-service teachers’ noticing skills and scaffolding practices. Six pre-service teachers were matched with a pair of sixth grade students to observe and scaffold students’ mathematical understanding while they were working on the given tasks. Data was collected through pre-service teachers’ own recorded videos of implementation of tasks, their written reflections about the implementations, videos of group reflections before and after the implementations, and students’ written work. The analysis of data revealed that pre-service teachers mostly noticed students’ errors and strategies during their interactions with students, they attended important instances about students’ thinking and justified their reasoning for their comments in their written reflections. However, while interacting with students, they usually used low level scaffolding practices such as asking for clarification, explanation, and justification rather than attempting to elicit students’ thinking and improve their understanding.     

浅谈高职院校辅导员工作的“两面三点”

高职院校辅导员在学生日常思想政治教育和管理工作中要坚持＂两面三点＂,使学生日常思想政治教育和管理工作上台阶、上水平、上档次,达到教育育人、管理育人。辅导员以改革创新为动力,在依＂势、术、法＂构建的学生日常思想政治教育和管理工作平台上,挥动着＂奖和罚＂这两面旗帜,履行好辅导员的职责,完成为中国特色社会主义事业培养合格的建设者和可靠的接班人神圣使命。     

The effects of skill diversity on commenting and revisions

The use of peer assessment to evaluate students’ writing is one recommended method that makes writing assignments possible in large content classes (i.e., more than 75 students). However, many instructors and students worry about whether students of all ability levels are capable of helping their peers. We examine how ability pairing (e.g., high-ability student with high-ability student versus high-ability student with low-ability student) changes key characteristics of feedback to determine which pairings are likely to benefit students most. A web-based reciprocal peer-review system was used to facilitate the peer review of students’ writing of two papers. Over 1,100 comments given to writers from their peers were coded for several relevant categories: type of feedback, type of criticism, focus of problem, focus of solution, and implementation. Overall, creating peer-review groups such that students receive feedback from someone of a dissimilar ability appeared to be most beneficial. High-ability writers received similar kinds of feedback from high-ability versus low-ability peers. By contrast, the low-ability writers received more comments that identified problems focusing on substance issues from high-ability reviewers. In addition, the low-ability writers implemented a higher percentage of the comments from the high-ability reviewers.